Two of today’s cartoons: a Dilbert and a Pearls Before Swine, both with elaborate puns:

(#1)

This turns on the verb weasel, plus the legal phrase (beyond a) reasonable doubt (plus the derivation of adjectives in -able from verbs).

(#2)

And this one turns on the noun and verb hex, plus the food compound Tex-Mex.

In each case, “getting” the comic requires two pieces of information, from different spheres. (And both beyond weaselable doubt and Hex Mex could be viewed either as elaborate imperfect puns or as complex portmanteaus:  weaselable + beyond reasonable doubt, hex + Tex-Mex.)

weasel. From NOAD2 on the verb weasel:

achieve something by use of cunning or deceit: she suspects me of trying to weasel my way into his affections.

• behave or talk evasively.

(presumably from the proverbial ability of weasels to escape from tight places and, in general, to evade capture).  Note that this is a verbing of the noun weasel.

reasonable doubt. From Wikipedia:

Beyond reasonable doubt is the standard of evidence required to validate a criminal conviction in most adversarial legal systems.

… The use of “reasonable doubt” as a standard requirement in the Western justice system originated in medieval England.

hex. From NOAD2:

verb [with obj.]   cast a spell on; bewitch: he hexed her with his fingers.

noun   a magic spell; a curse: a death hex.
• a witch.

ORIGIN mid 19th cent. (as a verb): from Pennsylvania Dutch … from German

OED2 marks these as “chiefly U.S.” and tracks the senses as follows: the verb (intransitive ‘to practise witchcraft’ and transitive ‘to bewitch, to cast a spell on’), with first cite in 1830, then the noun ‘witch’ (or transferred ‘witch-like female’), with first cite in 1856, then the noun ‘magic spell or curse’, with first cite in 1909.

[Digression on hex signs. From Wikipedia:

Hex signs are a form of Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, related to fraktur, found in the Fancy Dutch tradition in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Barn paintings, usually in the form of "stars in circles," grew out of the fraktur and folk art traditions about 1850 when barns first started to be painted in the area. By the 1940s commercialized hex signs, aimed at the tourist market, became popular and these often include stars, compass roses, stylized birds known as distelfinks, hearts, tulips, or a tree of life. Two schools of thought exist on the meaning of hex signs. One school ascribes a talismanic nature to the signs, the other sees them as purely decorative, or "Chust for nice" in the local dialect. Both schools recognize that there are sometimes superstitions associated with certain hex sign themes, and neither ascribes strong magical power to them.

... the term "hex sign" was not used until the 20th Century, after 1924 when Wallace Nutting's book Pennsylvania Beautiful was published.]

Tex-Mex. The (copulative) compound involves the clipping of both Texan and Mexican. OED2 has it as an adjective –

Designating the Texan variety of something Mexican; also occas., of or pertaining to both Texas and Mexico. [1949 Texmex Spanish; 1973 Tex-Mex cooking; 1976 Tex-Mex integration; 1977 the ‘Tex-Mex style’ [of music]

and a noun –

The Texan variety of Mexican Spanish. [first cite 1955]

and in the draft additions of April 2004, it expands on the culinary specialization (as in #2) and the musical specialization:

Also Texmex. A Texan style of cooking using Mexican ingredients, and characterized by the adaptation of Mexican dishes, frequently with more moderate use of hot flavourings such as chilli; food cooked in this style. [first cite 1963]

Also tex-mex. A broad genre of folk and popular music associated with Mexican-American inhabitants of Texas, characterized by use of the accordion and guitar, and often incorporating elements of Czech and German dance music; (occas.) spec. the more traditional form of this music, typically played by small dance bands, and more recently by rock and blues-influenced performers, as distinguished from a modern, more commercial form strongly influenced by pop and jazz. Cf. Tejano n. and adj. and musica norteña n. [first cite 1968]

Then from Tex-Mex to Hex-Mex (or Hex Mex)!

Following on a Zippy and a Mother Goose and Grimm, the day continues with three more cartoons: a Bizarro with sluggish portmanteaus (and a pop culture allusion); a Pearls Before Swine with a preposterous elaborate pun; and a Dilbert on expectations about conversational interactions.

(#1)

The allusion is to the monster film Mothra vs. Godzilla, with King Kong replacing Godzilla in a contest with Mothra. That enables Don Piraro to locate the confrontation on the Empire State Building,.

Piraro also chose to replace the giant moth and the giant gorilla with notably slow-moving creatures, a sloth and a panda, respectively, so that the confrontation becomes absurd (and terminally boring).

And then he combined the names: sloth plus Mothra gives Slothra, panda plus King Kong gives Panda Kong.

(#2)

In the spirit of the Pearls strip in “Return to Oz”, Pastis has the characters build to an elaborate outrageous pun of the “immortal porpoises” type — this time on supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, from the 1964 film version of Mary Poppins. And then, as in that earlier strip and some others, things go meta as Rat confronts the cartoonist and threatens him for his misdeed.

(#3)

The boss’s expectation of group conversational interaction (like a conference call) is that it will lead to a mutually agreed-on result, but Dilbert’s expectations are much, much lower than that.

… in today’s cartoons: Mother Goose and Grimm, with a perfect pun; and Bizarro, with an imperfect pun (or perhaps a portmanteau):

(#1)

(#2)

#1 plays on the ambiguity of beyond, as a preposition (in the shop name Bed Bath & Beyond, with an ellipted object, as in We drove to the border, but we couldn’t go beyond) or as a noun (as in the Great Beyond ‘the afterlife’).

#2 has iProd, either an imperfect pun on iPod (with an allusion to anal probing, or prodding, by aliens), or a portmanteau of iPod and prod ‘probe’.

There’s a Wikipedia article on anal probing by aliens, a pop culture joke that the entry says originated in the 1987 book Communion: A True Story by ufologist Whitney Strieber.

Posted by Hott Box on Facebook, and passed on to me by Mike Reaser:

I see this as a portmanteau (of Batman and fan), but it could also be seen as an imperfect pun on Batman.

The Batman theme (alluded to above) can be heard in a video in my 2012 posting “Batmaaaan”, along with a discussion of the mock chemical element Batmantium. In another posting of that year, “A batmanteau”, you can find the portmanteau batarang (Batman + boomerang).

It started with the Batmobile, Batman’s astounding car (which first appeared in 1966). Batmobile looks like a portmanteau of Batman and automobile, but both parts are more complex than that.

A collection of Batmobile models over the years:

(#1)

Let’s start with Batman (at first, the Bat-Man). This is a straightforward compound of bat and man, referring to a man who has some of the properties of a bat. The compound has primary accent on its first element, with a lesser accent on the second, a pattern that it shares with Superman, Starman, and some other proper names, including the invention Jockstrap Man of a recent posting of mine. The pattern contrasts with other one that has an unaccented second element, as in Frenchman and salesman.

Batmobile has the second element -mobile, last discussed on this blog in connection with the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile:

Wienermobile is a portmanteau of wiener and automobile, formally similar to Oldsmobile. The element -mobile is on its way to becoming a libfix, in that it can now be attached to virtually any personal name, to jocularly denote a car belonging to that person: Zwickymobile, Arnoldmobile, etc.

(and the Popemobile, of course).

Now, back to Batmobile. Its first element isn’t just bat, referring to the creature, but is an allusion to Batman, the superhero — another libfix, this time prefixed (like bro-) rather that postfixed.

From the Batman article in Wikipedia:

In proper practice, the “bat” prefix (as in batmobile or batarang) is rarely used by Batman himself when referring to his equipment, particularly after some portrayals (primarily the 1960s Batman live-action television show and the Super Friends animated series) stretched the practice to campy proportions. The 1960s television series Batman has an arsenal that includes such “bat-” names as the bat-computer, bat-scanner, bat-radar, bat-cuffs, bat-pontoons, bat-drinking water dispenser, bat-camera with polarized bat-filter, bat-shark repellent bat-spray, and bat-rope.

… When Batman is needed, the Gotham City police activate a searchlight with a bat-shaped insignia over the lens called the Bat-Signal, which shines into the night sky, creating a bat-symbol on a passing cloud which can be seen from any point in Gotham. The origin of the signal varies, depending on the continuity and medium.

In various incarnations, most notably the 1960s Batman TV series, Commissioner Gordon also has a dedicated phone line, dubbed the Bat-Phone, connected to a bright red telephone (in the TV series) which sits on a wooden base and has a transparent cake cover on top. The line connects directly to Batman’s residence

… The Batcave is Batman’s secret headquarters, consisting of a series of subterranean caves beneath his mansion, Wayne Manor. It serves as his command center for both local and global surveillance, as well as housing his vehicles and equipment for his war on crime. It also is a storeroom for Batman’s memorabilia.

(And Batman wears a batsuit.)

On the Batmobile:

The car has evolved along with the character from comic books to television and films reflecting evolving car technologies. Kept in the Batcave accessed through a hidden entrance, the gadget-laden car is used by Batman in his crime-fighting activities. (Wikipedia link)

And the Batplane:

The Batplane, later known as the Batwing, is the fictional aircraft for the comic book superhero Batman. The vehicle was introduced in “Batman Versus The Vampire, I”, published in Detective Comics #31 in 1939, a story which saw Batman travel to continental Europe.  In this issue it was referred to as the “Batgyro”, and according to Les Daniels was “apparently inspired by Igor Sikorsky’s first successful helicopter flight” of the same year. Initially based upon either an autogyro or helicopter, with a rotor, the Batgyro featured a bat motif at the front. The writers gave the Batgyro the ability to be “parked” in the air by Batman, hovering in such a way as to maintain its position and allow Batman to return.

The Batgyro was soon replaced by the Batplane, which debuted in Batman #1, and initially featured a machine gun. The vehicle was now based on a fixed wing airplane rather than a helicopter, with a propeller at the front, although a bat motif was still attached to the nose-cone. (Wikipedia link)

In addition, there’s a Batboat, a Batcopter, a Batcycle, and a Bat-sub.

And the other Bat-people:

Batgirl is the name of several fictional characters appearing in comic books published by DC Comics, depicted as female counterparts to the superhero Batman. (Wikipedia link)

Batwoman is a fictional character, a superheroine who appears in comic books published by DC Comics. In all incarnations, Batwoman is a wealthy heiress who—inspired by the notorious superhero Batman—chooses, like him, to put her wealth and resources towards funding a war on crime in her home of Gotham City.

… The modern Batwoman is written as being of Jewish descent and as a lesbian in an effort by DC editorial staff to diversify its publications and better connect to modern-day readership. (Wikipedia link)

there was one instance in continuity when Bruce Wayne adopted the Robin persona. In Batboy & Robin, a tie-in special to the DC Comics storyline Sins of Youth, Bruce and Tim Drake, the third Robin, had their ages magically switched. In an effort to keep up the illusion of Batman, Bruce had Tim adopt the Batman identity while he is forced to be Robin. (Wikipedia link for Robin)

Outside of the Batman world, there’s another, more entertaining, Bat Boy:

Bat Boy is a fictional creature who made several appearances in the defunct American supermarket tabloid Weekly World News. The Weekly World News published patently fabricated stories which were purported to be factual. Within the pages of the paper, Bat Boy is described as a creature who is ‘half human and half bat’. His pursuers, according to Weekly World News, are scientists and United States government officials; he is frequently captured, then later makes a daring escape. The original scientist who found him was named Dr. Bob Dillon. Matthew Daemon, S.O.S. (Seeker of Obscure Supernaturals) crossed paths with him on several occasions.

Bat Boy was created by former Weekly World News Editor Dick Kulpa. He debuted as a cover story on June 23, 1992. The original front-page photo of Bat Boy, showing his grotesque screaming face, was the second-best selling issue in the tabloid’s history, and he has since evolved into a pop-culture icon. He became the tabloid’s de facto mascot of sorts. The story of Bat Boy was turned into an Off-Broadway musical, Bat Boy: The Musical. (Wikipedia link)

(#2)

Following up on steak tartare, finely chopped raw beef, I turn to the related case of carpaccio, very thinly sliced raw beef; and the fish correspondent to steak tartare, ceviche; and the pleasures of raw shellfish.

Carpaccio, from Wikipedia:

Carpaccio … is a dish of raw meat or fish (such as beef, veal, venison, salmon or tuna), thinly sliced or pounded thin and served mainly as an appetizer.

Carpaccio is the international name of a typical Italian dish made with raw meat. The dish was proposed with this name for the first time in Venice, at the time of an exhibition dedicated to Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio which took place around 1950.

The dish, based on the Piedmont speciality “Carne cruda all’Albese”, was invented and popularised by Giuseppe Cipriani, founder of Harry’s Bar in Venice. He originally prepared the dish for the countess Amalia Nani Mocenigo when he learned that the doctors had recommended that she eat raw meat. The dish was named “Carpaccio” after Vittore Carpaccio, the Venetian painter known for the characteristic red and white tones of his work.

The typical Piedmont Carpaccio is made with very thin slices of beef meat placed on a dish with a marinade made with lemon, olive oil and with shavings of white truffle or Parmesan cheese, and can be topped with rocket.

The meat usually used for Carpaccio is beef sirloin, a cut tastier than the fillet. Since this is a dish best served raw, the meat must be fresh.

(#1)

(There is of course a tuna carpaccio variant.)

Hard to believe that the dish is so recent, but easy to believe that the name is so recent.

[Added 8/15: I had dinner at Three Seasons a few days ago and discovered that the sushi menu was gone, but sashimi of hamachi had been added to the (fusion) Vietnamese menu. It turned out to be not Japanese-style sashimi at all, but in fact hamachi carpaccio!]

On ceviche:

Ceviche … is a seafood dish popular in the coastal regions of the Americas, especially Central and South America. The dish is typically made from fresh raw fish [sometimes shrimp] marinated in citrus juices, such as lemon or lime, and spiced with ají or chili peppers. Additional seasonings, such as chopped onions, salt, and coriander, may also be added. Ceviche is usually accompanied by side dishes that complement its flavors, such as sweet potato, lettuce, corn, avocado or plantain. As the dish is not cooked with heat, it must be prepared fresh to minimize the risk of food poisoning. It may be safer to prepare it with frozen or blast-frozen fish due to Anisakis parasites.

The origin of ceviche is disputed. Possible origin sites for the dish include the western coast of north-central South America, or in Central America. The invention of the dish is also attributed to other coastal societies, such as the Polynesian islands of the south Pacific. The Spanish, who brought from Europe citrus fruits, such as lime, could have also originated the dish with roots in Moorish cuisine. However, the most likely origin lies in the area of present-day Peru.

(#2)

And then raw oysters (#3) and clams (#4):

(#3)

(#4)

Shellfish on the half shell is served with various accompaniments:  lemon, salt, cracked black pepper, mignonette sauce (especially cucumber mignonette sauce), Tabasco sauce (or another hot sauce), horseradish, mayonnaise, and cocktail sauce. Sauces and dressings:

Mignonette sauce is a condiment usually made with minced shallots, cracked pepper, and vinegar. It is traditionally served with raw oysters. The name “mignonette” originally referred to a bundle of peppercorns, cloves, and spices used to flavor dishes, but now simply means cracked pepper. Though different mignonette sauces use different types of vinegar, all contain pepper. (Wikipedia link)

Cocktail sauce, originally known as Marie Rose sauce, is one of several types of cold or room temperature sauces often served as part of the dish(es) referred to as seafood cocktail or as a condiment with other seafoods. The sauce, and the dish for which it is named, were invented by British cook, Fanny Cradock.

In America it generally consists of ketchup or chili sauce mixed with prepared horseradish. Some restaurants use chili sauce, a spicier tomato-based sauce, in place of the ketchup.

The common form of cocktail sauce in Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Iceland, France and Belgium, usually consists of mayonnaise mixed with a tomato sauce to the same pink color as prawns, producing a result that could be compared to fry sauce. It is so similar to Thousand Island Dressing that it is commonly referred to by that name, even in Britain… It is popularly served with steamed shrimp and seafood on the half shell. (Wikipedia link)

Russian dressing is a salad dressing invented in Nashua, New Hampshire by James E. Colburn, likely in the 1910s.(Colburn first named his experiment Russian mayonnaise, labels for which are today in the possession of collectors.) Typically piquant, it is today characteristically made of a blend of mayonnaise and ketchup complemented with such additional ingredients as horseradish, pimentos, chives and spices. (Wikipedia link)

Marie Rose sauce (known in some areas as cocktail sauce, seafood sauce, ketchyo, maychup, ketchanaise, tomayo, burger sauce, fancy sauce or dip) [note the portmanteaus] is a British condiment made from a blend of tomatoes, mayonnaise, Worchestershire sauce, lemon juice and pepper. A simpler version can be made my merely mixing tomato ketchup with mayonnaise. The sauce, as well as the meal from which its more common name, cocktail sauce, originates was invented in the 1960s by renowned British cook Fanny Cradock. It is often used with seafood, and prawns in particular. Giles Coren said: “Prawn cocktail dripping with Marie Rose sauce is, probably, most symbolic of 70s cuisine. Despite popular belief, Russian dressing, although demonstrating many of the physical and chemical properties of Marie Rose, is a completely separate condiment and should be treated as such.” [Apparently it’s all in the ingredients other than mayonnaise and ketchup.]

In the United States, a similar sauce, fry sauce, is served with french fries. And in the United States and Canada, another similar sauce called Thousand Island dressing is served. Thousand Island dressing recipe reputedly originated from the Thousand Islands in Ontario, Canada. (Wikipedia link)

Fry sauce is a regional condiment served with French fries. It is usually a simple combination of one part ketchup and two parts mayonnaise. When spices and other flavorings are added, it is similar to — but thicker and smoother than—traditional Russian dressing and Thousand Island dressing. In the United States, fry sauce is commonly found in restaurants in Utah and Idaho, as well as available by mail-order. Occasionally other ingredients such as barbecue sauce are substituted for ketchup, and other variations (created independently of the Utah version) exist outside of the United States.

The Utah-based Arctic Circle restaurant chain claims to have invented fry sauce around 1948. However, a recipe for Thousand Island dressing dating from 1900 has mayonnaise, ketchup, and pickles as the only ingredients, albeit in a 1:1 ratio. Arctic Circle serves fry sauce in its restaurants in the western United States. Many other fast-food restaurants and family restaurants in the region, such as Carl’s Jr, Crown Burgers, Apollo Burger, Astro Burger and Hires Big H, also offer their own versions of the sauce. Some variations include chopped pickles, chopped onions, and shredded cabbage. (Wikipedia link)

Thousand Island dressing is a salad dressing and condiment.

Its base commonly contains mayonnaise and can include olive oil, lemon juice, orange juice, paprika, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, vinegar, cream, chili sauce, tomato purée, ketchup, or Tabasco sauce.

It also typically contains finely chopped ingredients, which can include pickles, onions, bell peppers, green olives, hard-boiled egg, parsley, pimento, chives, garlic, or chopped nuts (such as walnuts or chestnuts).

Thousand Island dressing is attested in a 1900 cookbook, in a context implying that it was known by then in New Orleans.

According to The Oxford Companion of Food and Drink, “the name presumably comes from the Thousand Islands between the United States and Canada in the St. Lawrence River.” [There are elaborate stories.]

… In the 1950s, Thousand Island dressing became a standard condiment, used on sandwiches and salads alike. It is widely used in fast-food restaurants and diners in America. Thousand Island dressing is also often used as an ingredient in a Reuben sandwich in place of Russian dressing. (Wikipedia link)

Tabasco sauce is a hot sauce made from tabasco peppers (Capsicum frutescens var. tabasco), vinegar and salt. It has a hot, spicy flavor.

The sauce is produced by US-based McIlhenny Company to whom the “Tabasco sauce” brand name belongs. (Wikipedia link)

There are lots of ways to jazz up plain mayonnaise or plain ketchup, indeed lots of ways to do this by combining ketchup and mayonnaise. And of course there are dozens of hot pepper sauces.

In the New Yorker of 7/22/13 (p. 13 ), “Critics Notebook: Drawing Power” by Andrea K. Scott, beginning:

Hanging right now at the Morgan Library is a Lee Lorenz cartoon, titled “Proust Orders from the Cart,” which ran in these pages in July of 1989. The caption reads, “I’m out of madeleines, Jack. How about a prune Danish?”

(#1)

Visitors on the prowl for Old Masters or medieval manuscripts may feel a bit like Marcel when they encounter the museum’s latest – and most radical – foray into contemporary art, the engrossingly abstruse exhibition “Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney.”

Coming up: on Lee Lorenz; more from Scott on the Barney show; on Barney; a digression on a Barney-Flintstones mashup; on James Lee Byars; and on Hans Bellmer.

1. Lee Lorenz. From Wikipedia:

Lee Lorenz (born 1933) is an American cartoonist, most notable for his work in The New Yorker.

Lorenz is an alumnus of North Junior High School in Newburgh, NY (where he starred in student productions), Carnegie Tech and Pratt Institute. His first published cartoon appeared in Colliers in 1956, and two years later he became a contract contributor to The New Yorker, which has published more than 1,600 of his drawings. He was The New Yorker‘s art editor for 25 years, from 1973 until 1993, continuing as cartoon editor until 1997.

He is a musician who plays cornet with his own group, the Creole Cookin’ Jazz Band.

Lorenz has edited and written books on the art in The New Yorker, as well as the artists themselves, including The Art of The New Yorker (1995) and The World of William Steig (1998).

Two more cartoons from Lorenz:

(#2)

(#3)

#3 is an allusion to a folk tale / fable:

Henny Penny, also known as Chicken Licken or Chicken Little, is a folk tale with a moral in the form of a cumulative tale about a chicken who believes the world is coming to an end. The phrase “The sky is falling!” features prominently in the story, and has passed into the English language as a common idiom indicating a hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent. Versions of the story go back more than 25 centuries and it continues to be referenced in a variety of media. (Wikipedia link)

2. More Scott on Barney. Which is where Byars and Bellmer come in:

The artist, now forty-six, gained instant fame (and notoriety) in 1991, when, naked and harnessed, he scaled the walls of a New York gallery using a pair of ice screws, It was drawing-in-space as a mythopoetic endnurance test, coupling machismo and masochism. The pièce de résistance here is a muscular wall work, the remnants of an action that the artist performed in the space using Olympic-grade weights; it relates to his upcoming film, “River of Fundament,” which links subjects as various as Norman Mailer, Chrysler automobiles, the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris, Harry Houdini, and the chimeric artist James Lee Byars. But even Barney’s tamest drawings exude an exquisite perversity (Hans Bellmer comes to mind), with pencil lines so fine and winding they might be strands of hair.

Two Barney drawings from the show:

(#4)

(#5)

3. On Barney. From Wikipedia:

Matthew Barney (born March 25, 1967) is an American artist who works in sculpture, photography, drawing and film. His early works are sculptural installations combined with performance and video. Between 1994 and 2002 he created the The Cremaster Cycle, a series of five films described by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian as “one of the most imaginative and brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema.”

A Barney photograph:

(#6)

And

a still from The Cremaster Cycle, a series of 5 short films by Matthew Barney (Bjork’s baby daddy). The still is from my favorite part of the series-Cremaster 5. The scene is called “A Dance for the Queen’s Menagerie” (link)

(#7)

4. Digression on a mashup. Found on Google images (here), this poster for a 2009 event at the Chelsea Art Museum in NYC:

(#8)

(The museum closed in 2011.)

In the spirit of Mary Worth’s Howl, combining things of very disparate tone, this time via the phrasal overlap portmanteau Matthew Barney Rubble. Cremaster meets Flintstones.

5. James Lee Byars. From Wikipedia:

James Lee Byars (born April 10, 1932 – died May 23, 1997 in Cairo, Egypt) was an artist specializing in installation sculpture and in performance art. Byars’ notable performance works include “The Death of James Lee Byars” and “The Perfect Smile”.

From Byars, Tantric Figure of 1960 and The Angel of 1989:

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6. Hans Bellmer. From Wikipedia:

Hans Bellmer (13 March 1902 – 23 February 1975) was a German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer.

Much of his work exhibits a perverse fascination with the female body. Here’s a drawing and a set of dolls:

(#11)

(#12)

(Much of his work would have to be posted on AZBlogX rather than here.)

An assortment of short items on various topics, beginning with three from the July 22nd New Yorker. Portmanteaus, New Jerseyization, oology, dago, killer whale, and Gail Collins on Bob Filner.

1. Monster portmanteaus. On p. 25 of the New Yorker, Tad Friend in a Talk of the Town piece about horror moviemaker Roger Corman and his wife Julie:

Lately, the Cormans have been producing films for the Syfy channel. The titles are fairly self-explanatory: “Dinocroc,” “Supergator,” “Piranhaconda.” I balked at “Sharktopus,” Corman said. “I told the network, ‘You should go right up to the acceptable level of insanity in a title, but if you go over it, the audience turns against you’ — and then ‘Sharktopus’ was one of their biggest hits.” Coming soon, therefore, is “Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda” — not to be confused with last week’s succès d’estime “Sharknado,” produced by one of Corman’s many imitators.

From “More dubious portmanteaus”:

The world of portmanteaus is crowded with playful formations that are unlikely to survive for long (Higgsteria), including many that are just for ostentatious display (Piranhaconda and Sharktopus).

2. A prize -ize. On p. 45, in John Seabrook’s “The Beach Builders: Can the Jersey Shore be saved?”:

Orrin Pilkey, a distinguished coastal scientist and author from Duke University, calls the state’s approach to coastal engineering “New Jerseyization.” The term is not complimentary.

I have a sizable file on innovations in -ize, often inside nouns in -ization, including some based on proper names: Gitmo-ize, Cape Codization, Atkinize, Nascarization, Wal-Mart-ization, iPodization, Iraqization, Keplerize, Anderson Cooperization, Vermontize, Politico-ization, Walkenize. In older -ize words, there is a resistance to -izing words ending in vowels and words with accented final syllables, but these constraints are generally lifted for proper-name bases: New Jerseyization, Cape Codization.

3. And an excellent -ology. On p. 52, in Julian Rubinstein’s “Operation Easter: The hunt for illegal egg collectors”:

Oology — the study of eggs — is “one of the most exciting areas or ornithology and, in many respects, one of the least known,” Douglas Russell, the curator of the egg collection at [the Natural History Museum at] Tring [north of London], told me.

Oology is in NOAD2, but I don’t recall having seen this wonderful word before.

4. Another portmanteau. From Thib Guicherd-Callin on Facebook yesterday:

Today is my 12th Ameriversary. (Re-read this word carefully.)

America + anniversary.

5. A slur and a mythetymology. From the NYT on July 23rd, “Barbecue Vendors Ejected From Saratoga Over an Ethnic Slur on Their Food Truck” by Thomas Kaplan:

Andrea Loguidice and Brandon Snooks thought they had won the sandwich lottery when they were awarded a spot to sell barbecue at the Saratoga Race Course this summer. To prepare for the crowds, they developed a special menu, bought a six-foot smoker and cleared their calendar.

But on Friday, opening day at Saratoga, their dream went up in smoke. Complaints came in, not about the cooking, but about the name on the side of the food truck: Wandering Dago, which Ms. Loguidice and Mr. Snooks had thought was cheeky and clever, but which racetrack officials deemed simply offensive. The truck was banned from the grounds.

… Ms. Loguidice and Mr. Snooks, who are both Italian-American, started their food truck about a year ago in Schenectady; their best-seller is the HomeWrecker, which features pulled pork, brisket, smoked bacon, barbecue sauce and melted provolone on a toasted ciabatta roll. She said they meant no offense by using the word “dago,” a slur that the Oxford English Dictionary says is derived from the Spanish name Diego, but which they understood to refer to Italian immigrants who were day laborers, and were paid daily, or as the day goes.

“Our daily pay depends on what happens that day, so we just thought it was a fun play on words,” Ms. Loguidice said. She added: “We didn’t think it was derogatory in any manner. It’s self-referential. Who would self-reference themselves in a derogatory manner?”

Anthony J. Tamburri, dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, which is part of the City University of New York, said that regardless of the word’s origin, it was not appropriate for a food truck. He described it as “the most offensive term one could use with regard to an Italian-American.”

An inventive etymology, which removes most of the offense from the word. But it’s a mythetymology, and the word is indubitably offensive. From NOAD2 :

dago  noun ( pl. dagos or dagoes ) informal, offensive   an Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese-speaking person.

Whether dago is the most offensive term for an Italian-American depends on what you think of wop. From NOAD2:

wop  noun informal, offensive   a contemptuous term for an Italian or other southern European.

origin uncertain, perhaps from Italian guappo ‘bold, showy,’ from Spanish guapo ‘dandy.’

There’s a mythetymology for this one too, an acronymic one: from WithOut Papers.

6. Killer whales. From the NYT Science Times on July 30th, in “Smart, Social and Erratic in Captivity” by James Gorman:

[Diana Reiss of Hunter College said] she does not see ambiguity about killer whales. “I never felt that we should have orcas in captivity,” she said. “I think morally, as well as scientifically, it’s wrong.”

The animal in question, Orcinus orca, is actually the largest dolphin. Its name apparently came not because it was a vicious whale, but because it preyed on whales.

That would make killer whale a very odd compound, conveyong ‘whale killer’.  Wikipedia tells a different, though still somewhat confused, story:

The killer whale (Orcinus orca), also referred to as the orca whale or orca, and less commonly as the blackfish, is a toothed [marine mammal] belonging to the oceanic dolphin family. Killer whales are found in all oceans, from the frigid Arctic and Antarctic regions to tropical seas. Killer whales as a species have a diverse diet, although individual populations often specialize in particular types of prey. Some feed exclusively on fish, while others hunt marine mammals such as sea lions, seals, walruses, and even large whales. (link)

Oceanic dolphins are members of the cetacean family Delphinidae. These marine mammals are related to whales and porpoises. They are found worldwide, mostly in the shallower seas of the continental shelves. As the name implies, these dolphins tend to be found in the open seas, unlike the river dolphins, although a few species such as the Irrawaddy dolphin are coastal or riverine. Six of the larger species in the Delphinidae, [including the killer whale (orca),] … are commonly called whales, rather than dolphins (link)

So killer whales are (in common usage) whales, and some of them hunt (and kill) marine mammals, so killer whale isn’t a bad common name.

7. A dubious vow. From Gail Collins’s op-ed column in the NYT, “Things to Skip in August”, on the 15th:

You may remember that, in July, Mayor Bob Filner [of San Diego] was charged with sexual harassment by some of his former supporters who claimed that, among other things, he grabbed female workers around the neck and whispered lewd comments in their ears. That was the moment when the nation first became aware of the term “Filner headlock.”

Initially, the information was all secondhand, and Filner vowed that “the facts will vindicate me.” Even then, things looked ominous. For one thing, the facts-vindication defense had been preceded by a vow to behave differently. It was sort of like announcing that you’re innocent but will definitely never do it again.

Definitely an odd sort of speech act.

(Not about language, except for a couple portmanteaus towards the end. The last image is not SFW.)

Seeing James Marsden on the cover of the latest Out magazine and coming upon a Bones re-run with David Boreanaz in it led me to various sites that pick “the sexiest men” — on television, in the movies, in the world, whatever. Pure silliness, of course, but it brightened my morning with shirtless shots of these two television actors and three more from the lists: Shemar Moore, Jared Padalecki, and Jensen Ackles.

All five have wonderful smiles, which, unfortunately, they rarely display when they’re going about shirtless.

James Marsden. From Wikipedia:

James Paul Marsden (born September 18, 1973) is an American actor, singer and former Versace model. He is perhaps best known for playing Scott Summers / Cyclops in the X-Men film series, and for his roles in other commercially successful films such as the The Notebook (2004), Superman Returns (2006), Hairspray (2007), Enchanted (2007), 27 Dresses (2008), The Box (2009), and Hop (2011).

(#1)

David Boreanaz. From Wikipedia:

David Boreanaz (pronounced /bɔːriˈænəz/ … ; born May 16, 1969) is an American actor, television producer, and director, known for his role as Angel on the supernatural drama series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and as Special Agent Seeley Booth on the television crime drama Bones.

(#2)

Shemar Moore. Boreanaz and Moore are the beefiest of the crew. Moore probably wins on the pecs and abs front.

(#3)

Shemar Franklin Moore (… born April 20, 1970) is an American actor and former fashion model. His notable roles are that of Malcolm Winters on The Young and the Restless from 1994 to 2005, Derek Morgan on CBS’s Criminal Minds from 2005 to present, and as the third permanent host of Soul Train from 1999 to 2003. (Wikipedia link)

Jared Padalecki. From Wikipedia:

Jared Tristan Padalecki (born July 19, 1982) is an American actor. He grew up in Texas and came to fame in the early 2000s after appearing on the television series Gilmore Girls as well as in several Hollywood films, including New York Minute and House of Wax. Padalecki plays Sam Winchester on the CW television series Supernatural.

(#4)

And Jensen Ackles, who plays Sam Winchester’s brother in Supernatural:

Jensen Ross Ackles (born March 1, 1978) is an American actor and director. He is known for his roles in television as Eric Brady in Days of our Lives … as well as Alec/X5-494 in Dark Angel and Jason Teague in Smallville. Ackles currently stars as Dean Winchester on the CW series Supernatural. (Wikipedia link)

(#5)

Dean and Sam together. On the show, Sam and Dean are frequently taken to be lovers, and the scripts sometimes play off this misapprehension and suggest a sexual tension. This has given rise to a genre of slash fanfiction:

Wincest [portmanteau: Winchester + incest] is the term commonly used to describe fanfiction (or other fanworks) that depict or assume a romantic or sexual (i.e. Slash) relationship between Sam and Dean Winchester. It is the most popular pairing in Supernatural fandom, along with Destiel or Dean/Castiel.

… Wincest also appears in various types of Fan Art including digital manipulations, drawings and paintings and Fan Vids which may imply a sexual relationship through clever editing or the use of manips. No cross stitch samplers have yet been seen, but are sure to exist. (link)

Here the guys are displaying their bodies together in bed:

(#6)

Here, cruising together:

(#7)

And here, lovingly in bed:

(#8)

Getting back to David Boreanaz as Angel, there’s a rich vein of Spangel (Spike + Angel) slash material. And, in a final combinatory step, there is Wincest + Spangel material. This photo of a four-way is technically not X rated, because it skillfully avoids showing any naughty bits, but I wouldn’t show it at work:

(#9)

In the manip, Angel is on Sam and Spike is on Dean (vampires top, Winchesters bottom), so technically it’s neither Wincest nor Spangel — but then we don’t know what happens in the rest of the story (four-ways can be fluid).

Via Ellen Seebacher, a link to a HuffPo piece on

Cliteracy 101: Artist Sophia Wallace Wants You To Know The Truth About The Clitoris

Yes: clitoris + literacy.

Sophia Wallace isn’t the first to coin the word, but she’s made it into a big campaign.

Steven Levine writes me about coming across the portmanteau frape on a recent visit to Ireland, heard from young Irish acquaintances:

It refers to somebody getting hold of your Facebook access (I’m assuming because they all log in from their phones so this is easy enough for a friend to do, if you leave your phone sitting on a table or somethiing) and posting as you. (A fake post is a “frape”, and somebody might have a status saying “fraped again”.) It stands for “Facebook rape”.

At first, Steven didn’t know whether the usage was specifically Irish or specifically youth-speak (or both), but he’s since discovered that it’s widespread. There’s even a snarky e-card:

Google on {“frape” “Facebook”} and look at the images — many many screenshots of frapes.

There’s an Urban Dictionary page for frape, with a first entry from June 2007. The word came up on ADS-L back in 2004, but not in its current sense. From Larry Horn on 12/30/04:

Below you will find the second annual compilation of selected (by me) entries from students’ NEWJs (New English Word Journals), collected during the course of the past semester and submitted as one of the assignments for the Yale undergraduate course in the Structure and History of English Words.

… frape, v. ‘to make overly strong and/or unwelcome attempts at friendship’

Not long after it began to appear in its current sense. (I should remind you that Facebook began early in 2004.)

Frape incorporates a rape metaphor, and many have objected to the metaphor in general. A characteristic posting, by Chloe Angyal on HuffPo (“More Than Words: The Rape Metaphor” of 1/11/10):

… the young men [at the University of Sydney] … insisted that they had used the word “rape” metaphorically, to describe the defeat of a rival football team by their own. And they were probably telling the truth; among Australian college students, “rape” is often used to describe particularly unpleasant experiences. Certainly, it is a part of the vernacular of St. Paul’s, the residential college to which the young men in question belonged. The day after the article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, one member of the Facebook group expressed his feelings about it using his Facebook status: “Paul’s was raped by the SMH.”

It’s not only in Australia that “rape” is used as a metaphor for an unpleasant experience. Here in the US, it is not uncommon to hear the word invoked to describe a particularly grueling exam or an especially hard day at work. Indeed, Media Matters has compiled a rather disturbing montage of clips of conservative media commentators, most notably Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, repeatedly using the word as a metaphor for anything and everything bad.

There’s nothing wrong with metaphors, of course, and as I’m sure they’d be swift to point out, Limbaugh and Beck are well within their rights to use any words they please to express their feelings about taxation, bailouts and illegal immigration. But using the word to describe a garden variety bad experience trivializes the very real experience of rape victims. And the sad truth is that our culture already trivializes rape enough without the contributions of Fox news commentators or Australian frat boys.

It’s a complicated matter. Sexual and violent metaphors are natural for describing competitions, dominance, and undergoing bad experiences:

The Tigers totally destroyed / annihilated / screwed / fucked the Panthers.

What an awful test; I’m totally destroyed / screwed / fucked.

The rape metaphor is especially suited to the Facebook case, where the affected person is violated against their will.

It would be hard to tolerate the other violent and sexual metaphors while barring only the rape metaphor. The other violent metaphors glorify violence, and the other sexual metaphors incorporate negative views of sex, and you might reasonably object to them on those grounds, but I can’t see purging these metaphors from language use. In addition, many of these metaphors have become conventionalized to one degree or another, so that the literal senses of the lexical items are at least muted, if not entirely below the level of consciousness.

So you can agree that our culture trivializes rape but still not see every use of the word rape as literal (and trivializing of the experience of being raped).

Reflecting on portmanteaus yesterday, I was reminded of the breakfast cereal Quisp, with a name that combines Quaker (Oats Co.) and crisp. Quisp was introduced with a companion cereal Quake, with a name that alluded to both Quaker and earthquake.

From Wikipedia:

Quisp is a sugar-sweetened breakfast cereal from the Quaker Oats Company. It was introduced in 1965 and continued as a mass-market grocery item until the late 1970s. Sometime afterward, the company sold the item sporadically, and upon the rise of the Internet began selling it primarily online. Quisp made its return to supermarkets as a mass-market grocery item in late 2012.

Quisp was initially marketed with a sister brand, Quake. Its joint-product television commercials were produced by Jay Ward, a major producer of animated television series.

History: Quisp and the similarly marketed cereal Quake were originally released in 1965 in the United States by the Quaker Oats Company and generally advertised together (during the same commercial) with their character mascots competing against each other. The successful ads were cartoons created by Jay Ward, who also created the cartoon characters Rocky and Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-Right, and many others, and the Quisp ads used some of the same voice actors as the Rocky and Bullwinkle series, including Daws Butler as the voice of Quisp (an alien [from Planet Q]) and William Conrad as the voice of Quake (a miner [from the center of the earth]).

Description: Quisp is a baked paste of corn meal and syrup shaped like saucers. The taste is similar to fellow Quaker Oats cereal, Cap’n Crunch. Quake cereal was produced by the same process and ingredients, but shaped like the letter Q. Packaging as of 2012 carries the tagline on the front panel, “Crunchy Corn Cereal”, and on side panels, “QUAZY Energy Cereal”.

(Energy in this context means lots and lots of sugar.)

On the voice actors:

Charles Dawson “Daws” Butler (November 16, 1916 — May 18, 1988) was a voice actor originally from Toledo, Ohio. He worked mostly for the Hanna-Barbera animation production company and originated the voices of many familiar animated cartoon characters, including Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, Snagglepuss, and Huckleberry Hound. (Wikipedia link)

William Conrad (born John William Cann Jr.; September 27, 1920 – February 11, 1994) was an American actor, producer and director whose career spanned five decades in radio, film and television.

A radio writer and actor, he moved to Hollywood, California, after his World War II service and played a series of character roles in films beginning with the quintessential film noir, The Killers (1946). He created the role of Marshal Matt Dillon for the popular radio series Gunsmoke (1952–1961), and narrated the television adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (1959–1964) and The Fugitive (1963–1967).

Finding fewer on-screen roles in the 1950s, he changed from actor to producer-director with television work and a series of Warner Bros. films in the 1960s. Conrad found stardom as a detective in the TV series Cannon (1971–1976) and Nero Wolfe (1981), and as a district attorney in the legal drama Jake and the Fatman (1987–1992). (Wikipedia link)

Back in July Katy Steinmetz at TIME Magazine wrote me about portmanteaus and whether people are more prone to inventing them than they used to be. I had the impression that they are, but then I’m abnormally focused on portmanteaus, so my impressions aren’t worth much. I spent some time thinking about how to test the hypothesis, but without inspiration. Katy went on to post a nice piece on the subject, taking Twitter as the hook: “We, the Tweeple: Why Twitter Inspires So Many New Words” on July 24th (here).

Then this morning I thought of a fresh way to tackle the question, indirectly, by using the Google Ngram Viewer. But that just made the whole business murkier.

Katy’s piece begins:

Public relations firm Burson-Marsteller released its annual “Twiplomacy” report today. An analysis of how world leaders use Twitter, the name is the baby born of obvious parents: Twitter and diplomacy. It’s also a soldier in an army of fusion words—or portmanteaus—inspired by the social media site.

Every day, new combinations march into being. Twitteracy is the ability to understand the medium. Twittebrities are the A-listers who use it. Twitterati, Twittersphere, tweeple, tweetup, twisticuffs, twelete, twirting. There’s no question that there are a twitload. But why, exactly, is Twitter such a fusion muse? And will any of them last?

… Writing a CNN op-ed about the world’s fast obsession with cronut and Sharknado, author Lee Siegel suggests that pop culture may be in the midst of a “portmanteau craze,” driven by technology and a focus on visuals rather than concepts. A sharknado, he says, is a hard image to drive out of one’s brain box. Siegel goes so far as to wonder whether the viral spread of words like bromance and frenemy “herald a new phase in American verbal creativity.” [Lexicographer Steve] Kleinedler, for one, is skeptical—though he concedes that we may be more aware of portmanteaus than we used to be. That’s partly because crowded (social) media sites quickly latch onto anything new, clever and distinctive enough to rise above the noise on a given day. “Snappy portmanteaus certainly work well on Twitter, where space is at a premium and linguistic memes can spread quickly via hashtagging,” [linguist Ben] Zimmer says.

However, spreading quickly does not often give way to lasting long. Cronuts are already ceding ground to crookies in news stories. Obamaquester is a distant memory. The Internet gave new slang the potential to reach more people much faster—and when more people are exposed to new words, there’s a good chance they’ll get tired of them faster, too. “Very often these new portmanteaus are just the meme-tastic flavor of the week,” Zimmer says, “and their fall to the linguistic scrapheap is just as rapid as their ascent.”

People are indeed fond of inventing new words, mostly by portmanteauing — Lizzie Skurnick offers at least one coinage each Sunday in the New York Times Magazine — but these playful creations have no chance of catching on; they’re just for show.

On to the Ngram Viewer. First result, for the word portmanteau:

The trend is generally downhill. One of the local maxima is in fact in 1871, the year that the word first appeared as a linguistic term (in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass), but I wouldn’t put much emphasis on that; the early cites are almost all references to the portmanteau as a piece of luggage. The decline of portmanteau in the 20th century turns out to be a result of the rise of the competitor term suitcase.

OED2 on suitcase:

A small portmanteau designed to contain a suit of clothes. Hence more generally, a piece of luggage in the form of an oblong case, usu. with a hinged side and a handle, for carrying clothes and other belongings.

The OED‘s first cite for suitcase is from 1902. The word quickly carried the day, leaving portmanteau as used almost entirely as a linguistic term — at pretty much the same level of frequency since 1940.

Of course, blend has a long history of use to refer to portmanteaus, but that’s even harder to search for intelligently.

Today’s Pearls Before Swine, with an absurd portmanteau:

That’s disappoint(ed) + optimist. Though (like Goat) I wonder how you could maintain optimism in the face of constant disappointment. Note that Rat says he’s optimistic Goat will get smarter — but since Rat is always disappointed, we expect that Goat will not in fact come to understand disappoptimism.

The cover of the August/September 2013 Instinct magazine, with (as usual) male eye candy:

(#1)

Given the sexy photo, I expected the Putignano piece to be about so-called “sex addiction”, but in fact it’s about drug addiction.

From the article:

Joe Putignano has lived a lot of life in his 30 some-odd years. A world-class gymnast with Olympic dreams, athletics all too soon took a backseat to drugs, alcohol, depression and eventual homelessness. Joe’s new book, Acrobaddict, out in September, is a compelling chronicle of his journey from young Boston kid in the gym to heroin addict on the streets of New York to performing at the Metropolitan Opera House. But this isn’t just some addict-gets-sober memoir. Acrobaddict delves into an athlete’s obsessive struggle for perfection, the relationship between self-doubt and self-harm and the unbelievable resilience of the human soul.

… “When I wondered if I was gay, this feeling of trauma would come over me,” he says. “The fact is, it was harder to admit I was gay than admit I was a drug addict.”

Note the portmanteau acrobaddict.

On sex addiction. from Wikipedia:

Sexual addiction (sometimes called sex addiction) is a conceptual model devised in order to provide a scientific explanation for sexual urges, behaviors, or thoughts that appear extreme in frequency or feel out of one’s control — in terms of being a literal addiction to sexual activity. This phenomenon is not newly described in the literature, but it has been described by many different terms: hypersexuality, erotomania, nymphomania, satyriasis, Don Juanism, Don Juanitaism, and, most recently, sexual addiction, compulsive sexual behaviour, and paraphilia-related disorders.

… Medical studies and related opinions vary among professional psychologists, sociologists, clinical sexologists and other specialists on sexual addiction as a medical physiological and psychological addiction, or representative of a psychological/psychiatric condition at all.

The issue is one of the categorization of behavior — whether certain behaviors and inclinations should be characterized as pathological, and if so, whether they should be classed with substance addictions.

Shirtless bonus. While I was on the Instinct site, I came across this arresting cock tease photo of Brazilian model Beto Malfacini:

(#2)

Abs city, plus a fantastic smile. On the Instinct site, some shower videos of Malfacini from the Brazilian reality tv show A Fazenda, including one in which he manages to scrub his crotch and butt thoroughly without exposing either. On the show:

A Fazenda (… English: The Farm) is the current Brazilian version of the The Farm reality television show based on the Swedish television series of the same name that was originally created in 2001 by Strix and produced in association with Sony Entertainment and Endemol.

The show is based on a group of celebrities living together twenty-four hours a day in a Farm (located in Itu, São Paulo), isolated from the outside world (primarily from mass media, such as newspapers, telephones, television and the internet) while having all their steps followed by cameras around-the-clock, with no privacy for three months.

Twelve items that have come by me recently.

1. Today’s holiday. It’s (International) Talk Like a Pirate day today. Last posting on the holiday on this blog (with links): 9/10/11 “R!”.

2. On the spam watch. By the end of the day, I will have accumulated 400,000 spam comments on this blog since it started. Meanwhile, spam e-mail has been accelerating; I’m now getting hundreds of pieces a day: spam in Chinese, lots of spam from Dr. Oz, huge amounts of penis enlargement spam, and much more. Fortunately, almost all of this comes via a Stanford server that will shut down at the end of the month. Meanwhile, it takes a lot of time just to find legitimate mail in this heap.

3. Semantics of compounds. My AZBlogX piece on “Harnesses” yesterday distinguished two types (and illustrated them): the cross harness and the bulldog harness. The semantics of the first compound is straightforward — the harness resembles an X (in both front and back). The second compound is more complex: the harness resembles the sort of harness used for bulldogs.

4. Porn POP. On AZBlogX this morning, a trifle on the gay porn flick Pacific Rim Job. The title is a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau), combining Pacific Rim (the film features Asian men) and rim job ‘anilingus / analingus’ (the film features fucking and rimming).

This came to my attention in a GameLink ad for a bunch of porn films with titles of a variety of types: International Sausage Fest #3, Locker Room Workouts, Boys Home Alone, My Latin Lover, Horse Hung Hispanics 2.

5. More snarky fashion.  Also on AZBlogX this morning, two more snarkily captioned vintage ads for men’s clothing, with links to the three previous postings of this sort.

6. Electric crackers. From Arne Adolfsen on Facebook, this entertaining ad for Hippo Electric Crackers:

(#1)

I was enchanted by the idea of electric biscuits (especially with a hippopotamus as mascot) — imagine an electric Ritz Cracker — until I read the firm’s name and realized that the ad was for firecrackers (cracker as a truncation of firecracker), not biscuits (U.S. crackers). Ambiguity is everywhere.

7. Popularity. The September 8th New York Times Magazine had a section on popularity, with Adam Sternbergh’s piece “The Wisdom and Whimsy of the Crowd: What does it mean to be popular now?” as its central feature. Sternberg notes that for pop culture, the notion of popularity has been fragmented; “we no longer experience culture as one hulking, homogenous mass”, and what counts as popular depends on how popularity is measured.

Along the way, boxes with observations on examples of popularity: the most popular baby names in New York right now are Jayden and Isabella; the most popular cat names in America are Max and Bella, the most popular dog names Bailey and Bella; the best-selling baseball jersey is for Buster Posey of the San Francisco Giants (yay!); and so on.

8. ISIS on Slate. On Slate’s Lexicon Valley blog on the 17th, a nice piece “Are You a Double-Is-er?” by Alyssa Pelish, about ISIS, aka “Double-is,” “Extra-is,” “Double-be,” and the “Nonstandard Reduplicative Copula”. Pelish consulted with linguists (including me) and read a lot of literature on the topic (including my summary piece “Extris, Extris“), and then boiled things down to a fairly short piece for a general, non-technical audience. Good job.

9. An endangered language. And in the August Harper’s Magazine, “VNG³¹GYEU⁵³SVR⁵⁵ : How to read the dictionary of an endangered language” by Ross Perlin (assistant director of the Endangered Language Alliance), about the endanged language Trung (of Yunnan province in southwest China; about 7,000 speakers remaining); Perlin and three Trung collaborators have been putting together a substantial Trung-Chinese-English dictionary, to be finished later this year. The article has two sample pages, with discussion.

10. Mad Men. In the same issue, Thomas Frank’s Easy Chair column “Ad Absurdum”, about the tv show Mad Men. On p. 6, Frank reports trying to track down the origin of the expression in the show’s title, without great success:

The only instances of the phrase that we could find from Don Draper’s heyday occurred in a 1957 Saturday Review article and in an obscure novel published the next year, both of them by one James Kelly. That his pet coinage spread no further is hardly a surprise, since the ad industry of the day understood itself as a rational, even scientific, enterprise rather than a hotbed of lunacy.

11. Saganaki. One segment of a tv program on cheese that I stumbled on recently looked at saganaki. From Wikipedia:

Saganaki (Greek σαγανάκι) refers to various Greek dishes prepared in a small frying pan, itself called a saganaki, the best-known being an appetizer of fried cheese.

The word saganaki is a diminutive of sagani, a frying pan with two handles, which comes from the Turkish word sahan ‘copper dish’, itself borrowed from Arabic

… In many United States and Canadian restaurants, after being fried, the saganaki cheese is flambéed at the table (sometimes with a shout of “opa!”), and the flames then extinguished with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. This is called “flaming saganaki” and apparently originated in 1968 at The Parthenon restaurant in Chicago’s Greektown, based on the suggestion of a customer to owner Chris Liakouras.

The show included a visit to the Parthenon. I have in fact had flaming saganaki at the Parthenon.

12. Return to tartare. Continuing the food theme, I turn now to Mark Bitman’s September 15th piece in the New York Times Magazine, on tartare (discussed on this blog here), “Rescuing Tartare From the Stuffy, Old Power-Lunchers”:

In the go-go ’80s, “tartare” pretty much meant a pile of raw, well-seasoned chopped beef topped with a raw egg yolk. It was seen as food for the carnivorous power-lunch crowd — tartare even had a cameo as a status symbol in “Wall Street”— and for old-fashioned people who ate at old-fashioned restaurants.

I’m not sure what the first nonbeef tartare was, but I do remember getting a chuckle when my friend and co-author Jean-Georges Vongerichten introduced me to beet tartare sometime around 1990. In any case, tuna tartare has far surpassed beef in popularity, lamb tartare is fashionable and carrot tartare is expensive. In short, the field is wide open, and it’s time for home cooks to forge ahead.

It couldn’t be simpler; if you can chop or use a food processor, you can make tartare. The method is mostly an exercise in buying and tasting: first you find meat, fish or vegetables you’d want to eat raw (quality is essential, of course), and then you find combinations of garnishes that work. A few natural combinations to get you started: salmon with egg, chives, anchovies and capers; scallops with zucchini, miso and soy sauce; tuna with mustard and soy.

In a picture:

(#2)

Today is National Coming Out Day. From Wikipedia:

National Coming Out Day (NCOD) is an internationally observed civil awareness day celebrating individuals who publicly identify as bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender—coming out regarding one’s sexual orientation and/or gender identity being akin to a cultural rite of passage for LGBT people. The day is observed annually by members of the LGBT community and allies on October 11.

NCOD was founded in 1988 by Robert Eichberg, a psychologist from New Mexico and founder of the personal growth workshop, The Experience, and Jean O’Leary, an openly gay political leader from Los Angeles and then head of the National Gay Rights Advocates. The date of October 11 was chosen because it was the anniversary of the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

One of many posters created for the occasion, this one offering a portmanteau:

Earlier postings here on the occasion. From 2010, with an explanation of the personal significance of the day:

National Coming Out Day (October 11) … is a big thing in my house because that’s the date Jacques and I chose to be our anniversary. (When you don’t actually get married, you’re free to choose a suitable date. We thought about the date of our most important domestic partnership, in Palo Alto, but that was Valentine’s Day, which is also my daughter’s birthday. We considered the day we first declared our love for one another, and made love, but that date comes in between Christmas and New Year’s, an already crowded time of the year. So we cast about for other possibilities and came up with NCOD, which suited us both.)

From 2011, with a Keith Haring poster. And from 2012, with a discussion of various senses of gay.

Two portmanteaus that came past me recently, from several sources: racino and this year’s conjunct holiday (in the U.S.), Thanksgivukah.

1. racino. From Wikipedia:

A racino is a combined race track and casino. In some cases, the gambling is limited to slot machines, but many locations are beginning to include table games such as blackjack, poker, and roulette.

… As of 2013, racinos are legal in ten states: Delaware, Louisiana, Maine, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia.

2. Thanksgivukah. From the NYT on the 21st, “Carve the Turkey and Pass the Latkes, as Holidays Converge” by Stuart Elliott:

This year, in an extremely unusual coincidence of the calendar, the chants of “Gobble, gobble, gobble” for Thanksgiving will be interspersed with the singing of “Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel” for Hanukkah. The Manischewitz Company, the nation’s leading maker of kosher foods, is hoping to have fun — and sell its mainstay products like broth — by combining the holidays.

A multimedia campaign by Manischewitz will celebrate the early arrival of Hanukkah, which almost always begins in December, by encouraging consumers to celebrate “Thanksgivukah.” [also spelled “Thanksgivukkah”

In the Beautiful Farmyard postcard set, one for the Brahmousin:

Hybrids of many kinds are named by portmanteaus; the names mirror the things. So it is with the Brahmousin.

(Brahmousins are usually pictured as big and blocky, but here’s a sweet family.)

From French Wikipedia:

C’est un hybride de bœuf européen, Bos taurus, et de zébu, Bos taurus indicus. Cette race a été créée en croisant la brahmane aux qualités reconnues de résistance aux maladies tropicales et à la chaleur avec la limousine, race hautement productive et à la qualité de viande reconnue.

From the Brahmousin website:

The superior maternal traits, insect resistance, foraging ability, and heat tolerance of the Brahman combined with the carcass traits of the Limousin make Brahmousin an unbeatable breed for the cowman.

Two items for (U.S.) Thanksgiving: once more on Thanksgivuk(k)ah, and the entertaining tryptophantastic.

1. Thanksgivuk(k)ah again. The rare confluence of (U.S.) Thanksgiving and Hanukkah has been all over the net, including on this blog (because of the awkward portmanteau that has resulted). Now one more time, in the cartoon Rhymes With Orange:

(#1)

2. tryptophantastic. An ad on the woot! site for the holiday:

(#2)

Tryptophan + the -tastic of fantastic. The element -tastic has a life of its own as a libfix (see here). As for tryptophan, here’s Wikipedia:

A common assertion is that heavy consumption of turkey meat results in drowsiness, due to high levels of tryptophan contained in turkey. However, the amount of tryptophan in turkey is comparable to that contained in most other meats. Furthermore, post-meal drowsiness may have more to do with what else is consumed along with the turkey and, in particular, carbohydrates.